Making sound decisions

Why does making sound decisions matter?

Because leaders have to make decisions all the time, and it is often easy to fall into the pitfall of having impulsive reactions.

A good leader needs to be able to define their position on any given situation and to remain fair, unbiased and appropriate when going through and explaining their decision-making process. 

As a leader, every week, you are faced with hundreds of opportunities to make decisions. All these decisions can appear to carry not much value but cumulatively, they show patterns and an insight into a leader.  If you want to build trust and confidence amongst your peers and your employees you need to have some systems to help you make these decisions. 

It’s not easy to approach problem solving without having a specific outcome or agenda in mind. Suspending judgement until you gather the facts from all sources can be a struggle, but it’s doable! 

Most often than not, what is important in decision making, is not the actual decision itself but explaining the route you took to reach that decision. When leading a team, you will have a diversity of personalities and opinions to manage.  Many amongst your employees will not share your decisions, however when you are able to demonstrate that all ideas have been considered and explain how you came to certain conclusions, most will be onboard. 

Making sound decision can make you and your company successful or alternatively break the two of you.

If you are an aspiring leader, the chances are that, whoever is going to recruit you in your first leadership role will want to make sure you have a sound decision-making process in place that you can replicate. Does the following question ring a bell? ‘Tell me about a time when you had to make a decision?’

How do I start? 

The first thing is to know yourself and your behavioral patterns.  Think about some of the decisions you made, reflect on how you made these decisions. Did you have a system in place? Can you see some recurring patterns in these decisions? Did you need time?  Was there a gut feel sensation?  Did you feel the need to write things down?  Did you need to consult with others?  How did you explain how you made your decision?

Once you are aware of how you make decision, a good thing to do is to look at different 

decision-making tools and see what you can add from these to stretch a little your own model. 

We all have different personalities and ways of doing things that are so profoundly engraved in us that at times it’s difficult adopt a different perspective. Forcing yourself to look at things from a different place, with a different angle will only make your decision-making ability better.  A simple Google search will bring you a myriad of resources and models, find something that speaks to you and try it out. 

My personal favorites are the following: 

·     The Z model of decision-making (MBTI).  It looks mainly at what kind of information you gather (practical solutions, hard facts, past history, potential states, vision) and how you make the decision (data, logic, subjective elements, impact on others).  It provides a simple framework to stretch you into a different thinking mode and to consider elements you might have omitted (you will find a downloadable document on my website www.key2evolve.com).

·      Edward de Bono’s Six Hats, also known as the ‘6 thinking hats model’ will help you compartmentalize your thinking into different categories. This model forces you to look more deeply at different perspectives and thus creates new insights into a challenge. It’s useful for individuals and also works extremely well with teams. 

I also want to share an interesting tool I learnt during my Neuro Linguistic Training (NLP) training. It’s a simple technique to access more ideas and perspectives on a problem.  You can do it at home, in your own time and space.  Although the name and explanations for the process can seem somewhat complicated, depending on where you get them from, it’s actually quite simple. 

The presuppositions behind are simple too and based on the following:

·     Language is connected to experiences.

·     Any person processes and stores an experience in their own way following certain internal pathways.

·     Experiences are encoded and stored in different areas of the brain.

·     Eye patterns can indicate which storage unit, or area of the brain, is being accessed (see NLP eye accessing clues).

·     The way in which we recall and access our own experiences tends to follow specific arrangement.

·     If we want to get a different perspective, generate more ideas to solve a problem we need to access different storage areas.

NLP Trans Derivational Search (TDS) is simple.  Ask someone a question and you can observe where they get their answer from just by looking the movements of their eyes.  They will look up, down, to the side etc.  They ‘go inside’ then, they might look at images, access some self-talk, create new images and so on.  Everyone does it, everyone has got a unique way to recall experiences.

How do you use this information for yourself, in the context of decision making?

Sit in the middle of a room facing a wall and look straight ahead of you. Stay still and think about the problem you are trying to solve. Then without moving your head and body, think about your problem and start looking at the top left-hand corner of the room.  Stay there for a few seconds and move to the top middle part of the wall, then to the top right-hand corner of the room, then lower your gaze to the middle right side of the wall, followed by the bottom right-hand corner of the room.  Going clockwise, repeat this process until you reach your starting position. Then close your eyes and see what comes up.  Usually, by repeating this process a few times, different or new elements will come into your consciousness.  

Feel free to get in touch if you need more info or keep checking my website for updates and free tools. www.key2evolve.com

To finish with decision making (skill 2), here is an interesting short video that covers different strategies such as building score cards, thinking in the third person and taking a 2-minute diversion.